The Great Unknown Won’t Be Enough

I’m only 35% of my way through the game and I haven’t even TOUCHED the multiplayer yet. The graphics are stellar, the galaxy map brought tears to my eyes and the load screens while dungeon diving and travelling through space is just… I can’t wait for humans to get their shit together long enough for us to achieve such greatness.

My only gripe with it is the fact that it’s making me realize that my hope for space travel throughout the Milky Way for humans in about 150-200 years (some are shooting for Mars by 2030, however) will still not be feasible because of our racist society.

In the Mass Effect series, aliens have humbled the humans enough to where white supremacy is still in your face. Yelling at our new neighbors with white, male human propaganda of how great “we” are and demand a seat at the galactic table without having even earned one Scout badge in the 30 years we’ve opened the door to an alien community meeting. In today’s society, if aliens were to knock on/cave in our door, we aren’t even close to the level of “utopia” in the ME universe; White supremacy is still loud and violent since it still feels invincible, one giant alien ship (or asteroid, let’s be honest here) away from toppling over.

If we humans ever achieved the marvel that is space travel, we can only hope that white supremacy has let the other races have their 15 minutes to talk about why we need to work together to get shit done if we want to be great as a whole.

Anyway, after being asleep for 600 years, you forget about the racism the aliens express in the game if you’re a veteran player. It’s kind of jarring to hear a salarian talk about how terrible the krogan are after you just proved the krogan were no different from the salarians in ME 3. It got me thinking of how humans would behave if we ever accomplished such a thing.

IF we achieve intergalactic space flight, the first round would be rich, white scientists, military leaders, politicians and “humanitarians” OR a team of those people, followed by poor white volunteers and maybe a few handfuls of people of color. White people will and would never let people of color venture out into the great beyond without them. Even if PoC did make it out by themselves, white people would just Columbus a Columbus of color, anyway.

After 600 years, old, “dead” thinking will still be around, meaning settlements would be at risk for revolts, hate crimes and other atrocities if left unchecked. After 600 years, factions never stayed asleep, sexism couldn’t sleep and racism blinked. After 600 years, nothing changed but the house.

Let’s also talk about how people are woken up in shifts. If a person who wasn’t big on people of color got on board and was one of the first people to wake up, there’s no telling what kind of sabotage could happen to the pods of PoC if this person was in engineering or a politician or had enough money to “donate” to someone to make sure those pods didn’t wake up.

While the whole idea of space flight and travel is fascinating to the point of confusion, but if humans, specifically white people, don’t let up with trying to stomp on others for trying to do better for humans as a whole and then claiming an achievement as their own, we will never get anywhere and IF aliens decide to show up, the unity we claim to have in this “post-racial society” goes out the window since we can’t even come together to try to stop wars, let alone try to take on a possibly violent alien race.

Here’s hoping that in 600 years, humans are exploring the Milky Way and are dipping their toes in intergalactic travel and that racism is a talked about embarrassment in our history.